Providers in the Veterans Health Administration (VA) system vary in their testosterone prescribing practices, according to a study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. This is the first study to examine provider and site predictors of testosterone prescribing in the VA. There has been a large increase in testosterone prescribing in the United States over the past decade, and prescriptions increased substantially between 2009 and 2012. Some testosterone prescriptions have been made without appropriate baseline…

A 3-D model of FlyPi (left) and the assembled FlyPi with single micromanipulator and light-emitting diode-ring module, diffusor, and Petri dish adapter mounted in the bottom (right). Credit: Tom Baden Laboratory equipment is one of the largest cost factors in neuroscience. However, many experiments can be performed with good results using self-assembled setups involving 3-D printed components and self-programmed electronics. In a study publishing July 18 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, André Maia Chagas and Tom Baden from…

Flag -import-underlying-module Does Not Work The-import-underlying-module build flag causes implicit imports of Objective-C files into Swift, within the same module. This flag unfortunately doesn’t work with Buck. When Xcode generates frameworks, it generates module.modulemap and .hmap header map files to indicate header locations. The swift tool later uses these files to import Objective-C headers. However, since Buck doesn’t generate independent frameworks, it doesn’t generate these files. Thus, the -import-underlying-module flag doesn’t work in the swift tool. This means that we have to…

Do you know that apps are so useful that they can’t be ignored in any vertical? It’s, CAT 2017 season again and students are already geared up aiming for top MBA colleges in India and mobile apps have been their buddies, mentors, and teachers. This year it had been of apps raining all around the Play Store to coach and prepare students for the big day. Let’s have a look at few of the CAT preparation apps trending this year.…

Slice from x-ray computed tomography image of a supercapacitor coin cell assembled with the electrode materials. The thin layers — just below the coin cell lid — are layers of electrode materials and a separator. Credit: William Kuykendall Supercapacitors are an aptly named type of device that can store and deliver energy faster than conventional batteries. They are in high demand for applications including electric cars, wireless telecommunications and high-powered lasers. But to realize these applications, supercapacitors need better electrodes,…

MIT researchers have developed a sampling scheme that is unconstrained by bandwidth, allowing analog-to-digital conversion without “clipping.” Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT Virtually any modern information-capture device—such as a camera, audio recorder, or telephone—has an analog-to-digital converter in it, a circuit that converts the fluctuating voltages of analog signals into strings of ones and zeroes. Almost all commercial analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), however, have voltage limits. If an incoming signal exceeds that limit, the ADC either cuts it off or flatlines at the…

A recent article in the engineering professional’s magazine IEEE Spectrum reveals that several powerful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are sponsoring initiatives to breach the barrier separating our brains from the rest of the world. They all fall into the category of “brain-computer interfaces” or BCIs. For example, Facebook wants to develop a noninvasive (meaning you don’t need surgery to wear it) system that would let you type five times faster on your smart phone than you do now. A former Facebook…

Programming frequently deals in visible changes: the logic in your code, the dependencies you declare, the API you expose. There is, however, quite a bit of associated hidden change: transitive dependencies, generated code, and manifest files. In code review we focus on the visible because that is what is presented to us in the diff. A visible logic change in a pull request. It’s equally as important to pay attention to the hidden changes during code review. Transitive dependency changes or…

Discovered by British astronomer William Herschel over 200 years ago, NGC 2500 lies about 30 million light-years away in the northern constellation of Lynx. As this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows, NGC 2500 is a particular kind of spiral galaxy known as a barred spiral, its wispy arms swirling out from a bright, elongated core. Barred spirals are actually more common than was once thought. Around two-thirds of all spiral galaxies — including the Milky Way — exhibit these…

Images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot reveal a tangle of dark, veinous clouds weaving their way through a massive crimson oval. The JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno mission snapped pics of the most iconic feature of the solar system’s largest planetary inhabitant during its Monday (July 10) flyby. The images of the Great Red Spot were downlinked from the spacecraft’s memory on Tuesday and placed on the mission’s JunoCam website Wednesday morning. “For hundreds of years scientists have been observing,…